


Elusion

by tristinai



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Shakarian - Freeform, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 08:14:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7927339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristinai/pseuds/tristinai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He once said that if things go sideways, he'd meet her at the bar. He intends on keeping that promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elusion

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to my awesome beta reader, [Mordinette](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Mordinette/pseuds/Mordinette) for taking the time to look at this. I always value your input and it has been a source of encouragement for my muse :).
> 
> To those who are reading _After the Fall_ , I am in the process of editing and will be releasing the next chapter shortly. This was just something I had sitting on my hard drive that I finally got around to finishing. Please adhere to the rating as this is **explicit smut**.

5 years 3 months and 17 days after the Crucible was activated.

 

Garrus walks with a hesitant step towards the bar, eyes searching for a pair of familiar green eyes. He feels a flutter in his chest as he sees her, sitting with her back towards him, hair falling over one of her shoulders. She's wearing that same black dress that never fails to make him feel warm in places he never thought a human would be able to stir.

 

But it's all in the smile she gives him when she notices his lingering gaze, that smile that stirs an ache in him he's never quite been able to tame.

 

5 years 3 months and 17 days. Who would have thought this is how they would have ended up?

 

“Of all the gin joints in all the systems in all the galaxy, you just had to walk into mine,” she teases, as he takes the stool next to her.

 

Her fingers brush over his talons, as if tracing every minuscule scale to commit to memory. He breathes smoke as she sets his heart on fire with the heat in her eyes, the hunger that carries on every word passing through those lips he's dreamt all night of claiming. He sees desire as clear as he tastes it in everything that still remains unsaid.

 

“Five years. Still don't know how any of us got out of there alive,” he says, voice thick as he grips her hand tightly. It's warm in a way he hasn't been for a long time. “Sometimes, I wonder if it was worth what we sacrificed.”

 

He still dreams of those ghosts from their past, the ones that pull him into restless slumber so he can relive everything they lost. Again and again. Every night until he awakes, in a sweat-drenched, fevered state, mourning the dead that wouldn't stay buried in their graves.

 

“Relax, Vakarian,” she responds, laughter in her voice. “You survived the war. Now's as good a time as any to celebrate that.”

 

He doesn't want to disappoint the carefree smile in her eyes as she looks at him, with more affection than he deserves.

 

“Well, I heard that they carry the best turian whiskey this side of the galaxy,” he says, attempting to take her advice and lighten the mood.

 

She quirks a brow at that. “Really? Is that the only reason you walked into my joint tonight?”

 

He links his talons with her fingers. It always mystifies him at how easily they fit, like two pieces of shattered glass molded perfectly back together. They never cut each other on their jagged edges but find equilibrium.

 

“I always keep my promises, Jane,” he whispers, vocals shaking with something he can no longer contain.

 

If he sees sadness in her eyes, it's gone the moment she reaches up to touch his face, her hand feeling so good on him that he takes a moment to close his eyes, to feel her skin pressed against his damaged face plates.

 

When a familiar song comes on a moment later, he's already taking her hand and dragging her onto the dance floor.

 

“G-Garrus—?! You know I can't—!”

 

He feels her resistance and stops, ready to let her go should she so much as ask him to. They don't have a lot of time and he would be damned if he ruins this memory of her by being the cause of the scowl on her face.

 

“The whole galaxy knows you can't dance, Shepard,” Garrus says, mouth curling back to reveal teeth in a small grin. “So why don't we sway instead?”

 

She seems hesitant, looking worriedly at the dance floor and back at him. But then she's letting him pull her into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck. The way she looks up at him makes everything in the room fade, like distant gunfire on the battlefield, white noise to the war zone they once felt they could never escape.

 

But if this is a battlefield, he'd fall each time, defending everything he holds in his grip. He wouldn't let them take this away from him again.

 

“Alright. But just swaying,” Shepard warns. “You know how much I hate dancing, G.”

 

They move easily to the slow music, his hands resting on the curve of her waist. It isn't like when they had tangoed across the floor years before, their legs and hips moving in sync in a way that they had often reserved for the bedroom. Of course, their encore came later that evening in Shepard's preferred style—horizontally. Then, vertically. Then, horizontally again when he had her on the kitchen table.

 

“I don't think this table can hold us both,” she had said.

 

Garrus was never one to back down from a challenge.

 

The ballroom may lack the same intimacy of the bedroom but the longer they move to the easy tempo, the closer their bodies seem to gravitate towards each other until Garrus feels his hips pressing against hers. He looks down into her lidded gaze, the hand on her back dipping as low as he would allow before he gropes her inappropriately. His desire for her is pooling down low in his abdomen, a warm trill racing over his scales from the gentle grip he holds on her hand.

 

“Getting a bit crowded in here,” Shepard remarks, nonchalantly.

 

He positions one of his legs between her thighs, rubs her ever so discretely in a way that has her trembling against him.

 

With a dip of his head, Garrus whispers, “I've never been one for crowds. Maybe we should find some place a bit more... _private._ ”

 

“A little _privacy_ would be nice,” she agrees, biting down hard on her lip to keep from moaning out loud.

 

In an act of mercy (or possibly torture, with the dismayed pout on Shepard's lips), Garrus steps away from Shepard before any noise she makes could give away the game they are playing. Blood pumping hot in his veins, he takes her hand to lead her off the dance floor. A quick look around to ensure they have escaped anyone's notice and with the coast clear, they slip into the nearest bathroom.

 

“I want you,” Shepard whispers, with the same decisive conviction that echoes in his carapace.

 

And then she's pushing him against the wall, claiming his mouth with a hunger that reminds him he's been too long without this. His hands are already tugging at her dress, blunted ends ripping into the fabric in his haste. The tears he leaves are nothing like the ones she left on his heart when she sent him back to the _Normandy_ in London.

 

“Someone’s a little eager,” she says, with a husky laugh.

 

He would feel guilty if he believed she would need it later. He doesn’t.

 

The torn strap causes the fabric to pull lower, exposing one of her breasts to the cool air of the bathroom. Tiny bumps ripple across her milky skin, pooling around the hardening rosy bud that has her gasping softly when his talon brushes against it. Truthfully, Garrus has never really understood the fascination many races have with human breasts. He almost finds the sensitivity of human skin, in how it bubbles when exposed to cold, waters when in heat, to be more interesting. But he would be lying if he ever said that the sounds she makes as he laps his tongue over her pert nipple isn't the most wonderful thing he's ever heard.

 

His long, blue tongue explores what little of her he has exposed, tracing along her collarbone, nipping gently at the base of her neck. He finds the more angular parts of her to be his favorite, nearly wishes to bemoan how indifferent stroking those places would otherwise make her. The jut of her hips, the hard bone in her shoulders, the hint of ribs beneath the hard muscle beneath her breasts...when his talons rub her in that sensitive spot underneath the mound, her breathy laugh is not of arousal but of containing her mirth. Still, it has his lips tugging back sadly at how much he's missed the sound.

 

“I like when you do that thing with your tongue,” she says, her hand running up the back of his neck, stopping below his crest.

 

Hoisting her up with his hands, she wraps her legs around his waist as Garrus turns their bodies. Her breasts now eye level, his mouth pulls back in a smirk as he says, “You mean _this_?”

 

He drags the entire length of his tongue over her hard nipple, earning a cry that would have invited the kind of attention they had hoped to avoid when slipping into the restroom for privacy.

 

He does his best to suckle the bud, pull it into his mouth and tease it enough to have her dripping for him. With neither the softness of lips nor the shape of them, he does the best that his anatomy will allow and if her whimpers of, “Oh, G,” are anything to go by, it's enough to drive her mad.

 

He pushes her against the wall, dress hiked up around her waist, her smooth, bare legs sliding against his thighs like fine silk. He could sink into her, bury himself inside her, and chase away the outcomes of all the destruction the Invasion’s end has brought, the nightmare he relives every day when he drifts back into the monotony that his life has become.

 

“I want you inside of me,” is a raspy plea that has him straining against his pants, pressing against her but not into her. He groans into her neck, as sore for her as he's been without her, and only finds relief when her hand frees him, stroking him liberally.

 

“J-Jane,” he shudders, dipping his forehead until it's touching hers. He stops her with one of his hands, groaning low as his talons brush against his erection. There's nothing more that he wanted than to indulge her, feel her squeeze around him and whimper his name.

 

With one hand holding her up, his body angled to support her petite frame against the wall, he does not have to seek out her entrance, her wet folds inviting him inside as he pushes into her. That first, gentle thrust has her head turned to the side, neck littered with marks he's left on her skin, as a tiny cry tumbles off her lips. She feels so good that he temporarily loses himself, her warmth as soft as the post-coital kisses she'd pepper along his skin, in a time nearly forgotten, back when they had a galaxy to save and only each other to escape the stress of the war.

 

It's her voice whispering his name that brings him back, has his body moving into hers as he seeks out the evasion he could only find between her thighs.

 

“Anyone can walk in here, see you like this, a turian inside of you,” he growls, thrusting into her harder.

 

The nails that dig into the back of his neck send a pain trill down his back, make him shudder and slam her back against the wall. He's buried so deep, he feels he's losing himself in her. Everything is her scent, her sounds....her gasps that have him slowing down, her cries that edge him forward. She's tightening around him and he's struggling to hold onto this feeling, ride it out for as long as his body will let him.

 

“Maybe I want them to see me like this,” she moans, legs folding around his narrow hips in a vice, pulling him in impossibly deeper. “Then they'll know who owns me.”

 

And it's enough to drive him over the edge, to pull her with him as he thrusts into her once more. There's a brief moment where it's just them: her widening eyes, sultry and wanting as he drowns in liquid emerald. The calloused fingers pressing against the scales on the back of his neck, roughened from years of combat. Her thighs that wrap them tightly, joining them, making him foolishly believe for an instant that this is always how it could be...

 

Then, the moment's broken as he's spilling inside of her, struggling to keep both of them up. He rides the tremors that have his body shaking, emptying himself along with the remnants of this pipe dream. Although he hears her moan his name, he no longer believes in this self-made _reality_ and the death of it hurts almost as much as hers had back on Earth.

 

As Shepard traces her hand across his scarred mandible, Garrus is so overcome with shame that he drops her unceremoniously onto the floor.

 

“Garrus?” she questions, unable to disguise the hurt in her eyes.

 

He freezes as she extends a hand up to him, feels his carapace burn from the familiar sorrow that often has him tossing and turning late into the night.

 

But as he tries to grasp her hand, she disappears into bits of breaking data.

 

The bathroom walls fade to a room Garrus escapes from every time he puts on the visor, to the hell he wakes up to every morning, the space beside him as cold and empty as her absence. Streams of golden data flash across all of the surfaces of his bedroom before him and when he looks to the space in front of him, he sees the Shepard VI once more. Though, this time, she's fully clothed in her Alliance uniform. Her unblinking, impassive face fills him with sorrow and guilt for how low he has sunk, if only to pretend she is still with him.

 

“Simulation complete,” the Shepard VI says. “You have reached the maximum time for today's virtual simulation. Is there anything else I can assist you with before this program terminates, Admiral Vakarian?”

 

Garrus swallows hard, looking away from the VI. His chest is heavy and yet, for all the effort that went into creating this specific program, he can never stand seeing her like this. The VI's inhuman lack of gesture reminds him that he's replaced skin-to-skin contact with data and that somehow makes him all the more disgusted.

 

“No, that will be all, Shepard.”

 

“Logging you out.”

 

Pulling the visor off, Garrus sets it aside on the nightstand. He no longer sees streams of data in his room but the same darkness that greets him every time he exits the simulation, where out of misplaced guilt, he programs it to go to that bar that she must be sitting at now.

 

The 28 hours he waits before the program resets, a safeguard to prevent users from being trapped in virtual reality, will be agonizing. He's stopped pretending he cares for anything outside of their artificial paradise, where she whimpers his name and enslaves him to a fantasy so real, he is convinced he tastes her whenever his tongue slides between her lips.

 

But coming off the simulation high, he is left with memories, nightmares, and a survivor's guilt that claws at his chest, ripping him from the inside out each time he takes a breath and his lungs remind him that there are at least another eighty years of this. Eighty years without  _her._

 

_You'll never be alone_ , is a promise she had once made to him.

 

Yet 5 years 3 months and 17 days later, Garrus still wakes up alone.

 


End file.
